IBM App Connect - Integrate Maximo with Google Sheet, SalesForce, and ServiceNow

While having a break between projects, I have some free time to play around with IBM’s new toy: App Connect. After several years working with Enterprise applications, I’ve got to a point where I can tell if a system is great or not after playing around with it for a short time.  Some examples of great systems or platforms I have experience with is Maximo (of course), React Native (for mobile development), and SAP. Some examples of *not so great* systems I played with include Oracle EBS, Infor SunSystems, Maximo Anywhere mobile platform.

With App Connect, I can tell this is an excellent tool after going through a few beginner tutorials. I can immediately come up with some useful use case using it to enhance Maximo by integrating it with other cloud applications. Below are two examples:

Maximo Crash Course on Youtube - Starting point for a complete beginner

After posting a bunch of Maximo training videos in Vietnamese on Youtube, I got some requests for similar contents in English. On the web, there are plenty of Maximo resources in English; so I didn’t think it is necessary to create new duplicated content. But someone recently pointed out to me that as a beginner, he doesn’t know where to start. So here it is, a bunch of *super short* videos to get you started with Maximo. After going through these, I’m sure you will have a better idea on which direction you want to learn more about the software.

 - Basic concepts in Maximo asset management: These tutorials are done on the IBM public Maximo preview site, so you don’t need to set up anything to do some exercises

Deploy Maximo 7.6.1 on Websphere 8.5

Out of curiosity, I installed Maximo 7.6.1 on a VM to explore the new features. Then I found that I kind of like it, so I wanted to deploy it on my host OS to get rid of the VM. The trouble is I have Websphere 8.5.5.3 which comes with Maximo 7.6.0.0. I can run maxinst.bat to create demo data with Oracle 11g without a hiccup, but the deployment of the EAR file to Websphere didn't go well.

It turned out Maximo 7.6.1 requires Java 1.8 and Websphere 9. It's not possible to upgrade Websphere from version 8 to 9. We will have to install a new Websphere environment and migrate all of the settings which sounds like a lot of work. I decided to tweak it a little bit to make Maximo 7.6.1 runs on Websphere 8.5 using the following process:

Basic steps integrating Maximo Spatial and ArcGIS

Due to many changes in different versions, documentation provided by IBM for Maximo Spatial integration is scattered and inconsistent. In this video, I’ll give a quick demo on how to carry out the most basic configuration to enable integration between Maximo Spatial version 7.6 and ArcGIS.

In the video, what we have is a sample non-secured ArcGIS online server. However, enterprise GIS map services are often provided via SSL layer and can use token-based authentication. So below are some of the common problems